The foreign debt of English literature

(c) Celtic Literature and English

We are apt to forget how considerable a substratum of the “English” people is Celtic. The first historical inhabitants of Britain were mainly Celts. They filled England and Scotland as they now fill Wales; they still occupy most of Ireland and of the Caledonian Highlands. The conquering Romans with their settlers and legionaries affected the population very little. When the Anglo-Saxons and Danes came in their successive waves, and occupied the southern, eastern, and northern portions of Great Britain, they did not arrive in numbers so great as absolutely to sweep away the existing people, that blend of little Roman with much Celt. They simply laid thicker strata on the ethnological concretion. The Celtic strain was much thinned, particularly in England, but it was by no means eliminated. The subsequent Norman invaders count numerically for little in the mass. If, therefore, we take the whole body of English literature, and think of the men who have produced it in Great Britain and Ireland, we cannot but recognize that in those writers there were probably certain Celtic elements, which must have had some potency in determining their capacity for thought and feeling. Englishmen may call themselves Anglo-Saxons, and we may be mostly made of Anglo-Saxon clay, but we do not know how much of us is, after all, the contribution of a Celtic strain, with its characteristic tendencies, the melancholy sentiment and the chivalrous but inconstant ardour which mark the Celtic race. Nevertheless it is one matter to speak of the Celtic spirit in our literature, and another to display the influence of Celtic literature upon our own. Celtic literature properly means the literature of peoples speaking Celtic, and to that literature some debts are due, at least to the Cymry of Wales and Brittany.

Already before the Anglo-Saxon invasion there were doubtless floating among the British Celts legends of mystery and marvel congenial to the racial taste. After the conflicts with the Saxons a great chieftain, Arthur, grew into prominence, and around him were destined to gather both these older legends, and also new stories of adventures with human foes, with dragons, or with mysterious powers and spells. Christianity, working upon the natural temperament of the Celt, encouraged that idealizing self-dedication to the cause of love or piety, which belongs to knights with a mission to “right the wrong.” It is this spirit which is the most important Celtic contribution to the literature of the middle ages.

In the sixth century Gildas, called by Gibbon the “British Jeremiah,” who had at least been educated in Wales, writes in Latin his Destruction and Conquest of Britain, a dirge in the true tone of Celtic remonstrance against the hardship of ruthless circumstance. In the ninth century Nennius composes a summary of Welsh traditions, in which we meet with the story of Brutus as the legendary colonizer of primitive Britain. In 1132 appeared the Latin History of the Britons by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who pretends to base his interesting but unhistoric compilation upon materials gathered in Brittany by Walter of Oxford, but who probably collected at least as many from the neighbouring Celts of Wales. In this work are to be found not only the legendary Brutus, but also the stories of Gorboduc and Lear, afterwards to figure in Elizabethan drama. The cycle of Arthur is as yet incomplete; the Holy Grail is not mentioned nor the Round Table.

In 1155 the Jersey Norman, Robert Wace, converts and amplifies Geoffrey’s work into the French romance Brut d’Engleterre or Geste des Bretons, introducing for the first time the Table Round. This again is developed in English verse by Layamon in his Brut of 1205. From various sources, and by various hands, the Arthurian legends are increased, first in the romances in verse, next in the romances in prose. Though the infusion of Celtic chivalrous sentiment appears in all, there are naturally various degrees in the mysticism and asceticism which they display. The vogue of these romances was not confined to France and England. As with other portions of the epic verse of France, it passed into Italy, and inspired both the predecessors of Ariosto and also that great poet himself. Thence, as well as from the sources nearer home, it awoke the interest of Spenser. To the same subjects Milton also was for awhile strongly attracted. In his Epitaphium Damonis he shows the hold which the Arthurian legends had taken upon him, and he explicitly proposes to make Arthur and the British knights the subject of an epic. In the Sabrina of the Comus, and in various references, the same poet reveals how well read he was in the matter of Geoffrey.

In Spain “matter of Britain” took a new lease of life. In that country was produced the series of chivalric romances in prose, which began soon after the year 1300 with the Amadis of Gaul (i.e., Wales), and continued for nearly three centuries, until, from their increasing extravagance, they fell into disrepute, and were finally slain by the satire of Cervantes. How these operated together with pastoral, to produce the sentimental longueurs of La Calprenède and Scudéry in France of the seventeenth century, and thence affected the novel and drama of post-Restoration England, is told in the sketch of the literature of Spain. The affiliation to Celtic origins is in this case clear enough, but with the circuitous route there goes a gradual defection in that real Celtic spirit which was possessed by the original Amadis.

When we are asked at what date English literature is most distinctly affected by the creations of Celtic countries, we may reply that it is chiefly before the age of Chaucer, when the romantic legends of Arthur and his Table came through two channels; on the one hand through Breton sources, on the other through Wales. This is, in point of subject matter, the largest Celtic contribution on which we can lay our hand. To it we owe not only the Arthurian cycle of romances as we find them in Geoffrey, the trouvères, Layamon, and later in the compilation of Sir Thomas Malory (called Morte D’Arthur), which was one of the earliest books that Caxton chose to print; but also much reference in Spenser and Milton, as well as the whole substance of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. To a once independent group of legends, afterwards brought into relation with the Arthurian, we owe the exquisite Tristram and Iseult of Matthew Arnold.

It was in “matter of Britain” that appeared the special vein of tender chivalry which passed into the romances, first of France, then of Italy and Spain. Not in Germany, not in Italy, not in Provence, not in Spain, did these stories of knightly loyalty and uttermost honour and devotion take their rise. It was in Northern France, where Franks and Normans were in contact with the large Celtic remnants of the Bretons. In all these legends there speaks the Celtic voice, rememberable and distinguishable everywhere by its prevailing melancholy, its devotion to a cause, be that cause right or wrong, be it strong or weak.

For the rest, we are in no position to fix the first invention of the Quest of the Holy Grail, or any other legend of the cycle, upon any definite author. What we allow to Tennyson in his liberties with the details of the stories and the form they take, we must perforce allow to the many who had told and retold the same stories scores of times since the Celt of Britain first passed them on to Brittany.

A very dubious, if not wholly mythical, figure in Celtic literature, is the once hugely admired Ossian. Macpherson, a contemporary of Dr. Johnson, came into prominence at the time when the eighteenth century was growing weary of the “classicism” of the school of Pope, and was ready to be interested in the simple, frank, romantic world. Macpherson was a Scotsman, who pretended to have collected from manuscripts, and from the memory of Highlanders, sundry poems of a certain Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century. These he translated into pompous declamatory prose, attempting something like the style and imagery of the Hebraic scriptures, but overstraining both. They were received with immense enthusiasm in England, France, and Germany, and were Napoleon’s favourite odes. Unhappily the alleged originals will, for the most part, not bear the light of criticism. Johnson did not scruple to call Macpherson an impostor. That there was an Ossian is probable, but the few poems which can with tolerable safety be assigned to him belong to a much later date than Macpherson claimed. Nevertheless, though Macpherson’s Ossian may be as great an imposture as Chatterton’s Rowley Poems, he, no doubt, did gather from the Celtic fragments and the Celtic folklore a mass of imagery and fire of words, which came in most fitting time to lend some help in ridding the weary world of the stereotyped coldnesses of the followers of Pope.

(d) Hebrew Influence

For those who are not Hebrews, Hebrew literature means the Bible, and especially the old Testament of that Bible. It would be a vain pretence to attempt to show precisely how far the Bible has influenced the thought of English writers. It is not our province here to deal with morals and moral influence, however much we may recognize that, since out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh, our English literature could not have been the literature it is, if the moral disposition and attitude at the back of it had been other than they are. And these have been in the largest measure determined by the Old Testament of the Hebrews.

Imagine for a moment that the Bible did not exist, that no Englishman had ever read one line of it, that the religious notions which it inculcates were without expression in any such established standard. Our way of looking at life and at things suprasensual, our maxims of conduct, our ideals of feeling, would obviously be something widely unlike those which we now entertain. A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation’s soul. Give us a different soul, and the expression will convey that difference. We cannot separate literature from moral conceptions and moral tone, and therefore, in a sense, the Hebrews have determined our literature more than all other influences combined. And there is this manifest and vastly important difference between the influence of the Bible and the influence of any other work. The Biblical thoughts have become part of our earliest, youngest, and most plastic selves. We are born into them, and brought up in them, as something natural to ourselves. The English heart and mind are now partly made of Hebrew thoughts and ideals. This fact is so obvious that we need not pursue it further. To other literatures we have looked for models to imitate and notions to borrow; to the Biblical literature we have looked for a transfusion of all our thinking.

But there is also a purely literary effect of the Bible, concerning which a few words must be said. Who can estimate the immense extent to which Biblical imagery and Biblical phrase—what one may call Biblical style and Hebrew style—have determined the style of English writers? Remember that the average English child is brought up on the Bible, that he reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests it; that its diction and its figures of speech persist, however loosely, in his memory. What is the result? Is it not that, though in a less degree than with the Puritans, there remains, consciously or unconsciously, a habit of imitating those figures and further developing them; of imitating that diction, and carrying it into his higher forms of speech and his writings? Take the great preachers and religious prose writers from Jeremy Taylor to Cardinal Newman, and observe how their language unconsciously follows the rhythm, clothes itself in the dignity, and repeats the very phraseology, of the authorized version of the scriptures. Take poets like Milton, or mere verse-writers like Akenside, and see how their language seems to echo the language of the Testaments, Old and New.

It is true that the language of the “Authorized Version” is English and not Hebrew. None the less the imagery, the similes and metaphors, the fiery turns of exhortation and denunciation, the fervent question and the apostrophe, all these and other elements which make up style, are, apart from the rhythm, Hebrew and not English. And it is to these things we refer when we speak of the purely “literary” effect of the Bible on our writers. Quite apart from the spiritual effect which is sought for without reference to the qualities of the style, there are, all the time, powerful qualities in the Hebraic style itself, qualities often reaching to the poetical sublime. Take, for instance, the passage, “Whither shall I go then from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I go then from Thy Presence? If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there: if I go down to hell, Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say ‘Peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with Thee: but the night is clear as the day: the darkness and the light to Thee are both alike.” And once again: “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though not anointed with oil. From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty. Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided. They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights; who put on ornaments of gold on your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!”

What we are here concerned with is the way in which the diction of every English writer has been dominated from his youth up by echoes of words like these, which he received into his plastic mind in childhood, and which mix themselves with his thoughts as he shapes the words and the images of his English prose or verse.

If, indeed, we were to take our greater authors and read them through, pencil in hand; if we were to mark those words and images and turns of expression which we feel to be derived consciously or unconsciously from the English version of the Hebrew Bible, we should be amazed to find how much of purely literary strength and dignity that one book has added to our tongue.

And this Hebrew influence has existed ever since we were a nation, nay, even before. There was, indeed, no translated English Bible till the days of Wyclif, the contemporary of Chaucer; nevertheless the images and thoughts of the Latin Vulgate had become part of every good ecclesiastic, and in all preaching and exhortation the Biblical phrases were heard in English, perhaps rougher and less rhythmical than those of our own version, but still with their essential quality retained. Remember again that, still in these days, in all Christian churches, the language employed is deliberately Biblical, that the prayers are Biblical in expression, and that the language is considered the more apt and more effective in proportion as it more distinctly bears the Hebraic impress. Put all these considerations together, and it will be recognized without need of further words than on literary style, as well as on moral sentiment, the influence of the one Hebrew book has been unparalleled. Meanwhile the writings in English verse and prose which have taken their titles, their subject matter, their suggestions, or their inspiration, from the Bible, would form an interminable list.

SOME POINTS IN THE PEDIGREE OF POETRY.